2-14-2005

Three favorite mystery writers have a Christmas gift for you and your friends. 

First is a new Janet Evanovitch book.For the holiday  Janet has suspended stories about StephaniePlum and her cohorts in The Burg.  “Metro Girl” features Baltimore’s Alexandra Barnaby who is on the trail of her missing and none too bright brother, who is somewhere in South Florida.  This is a special holiday gift from Harper; Reguar price would be $26.95; here, for the holiday $16.49.

Next Christmas present:  Mary Higgins Clark and daughter Carol Higgins Clark  collaborate on “The Christmas Thief” (Simon & Schuster; $20.00), which describes the  attempted theft by a gang who couldn’t steal straight attempting to heist the spruce tree  from the Trapp Family lodge in Vermont  destined to be the Rockefeller Center holiday tree.

 The two sleuths in the book are Mary’s Alvirah Meehan, cleaning  lady-lottery winner-amateur sleuth and Regan Reilly, Carol’s  sleuth, daughter of mystery writer Nora and Luke Reilly.The group assembles for a dash of holiday merriment  and solve the  theft of the tree before it arrives at its Rockefeller Center destination,  done to a backdrop of “Sound of Music” songs.

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 There’s a new  Archer Mayor, “The Surrogate Thief”, featuring Brattleboro’s Joe Gunther.  Mayor’s stories in and around Brattleboro may have been the first of the successful regional mysteries.  Mayor has stuck to his turf. .  He  is an assistant medical examiner in Vermont and loves shedding light on old evidence using modern forensic techniques, Since this 15-book series began in 1988,  it has become better and better. This fall “The Surrogate Thief”(Mysterious Press;$24.95), a mystery that has Gunther solving an old case in which he is personally  involved has just been honored with the New England Book Award for best fiction of the year.

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 If you can’t judge a book by its cover—or its title—you might be discouraged by “The Librarian” by Larry Beinhart, a paperback original, 442 pages by Nations Books  ($15.95) If you do this you’ll be denying yourself the extraordinary enjoyment of reading an intelligent, timely thriller.  It’s about hardball politics and stealing an election, eerily plausible.  The only innocent is David Goldberg, a university librarian  who blunders into a devilishly complex plot designed by eccentric developer billionaire Alan Cranston Stowe, for whom he has been moonlighting.

 The central scenario involves the incumbent Republican president, August Winfield Scott and an unlikely Democratic challenger, Anne Lynn Murphy, whose come-from behind candidacy worries Stowe’s minions, who’ve thought they bought up the requisite votes from a passel of beholden Senators.  Midst all these shenanigans, led by Homeland Security  head Col. Jack Morgan ,Goldberg is perceived to know secrets he doesn’t know.  Goldberg, pursued by Homeland Security on trumped-up charges  of bestiality, sheds his naivte and manages to avoid the various traps set for his extinction.  Not a cosy, “The Librarian “has more than the requisite high speed chases, shootings, killings and as many dirty tricks as both Republicans and Democrats today,with their trial lawyers at the ready and their garbage can-exhuming associates skulking round at night.  Like reading a daily newspaper rather than a novel.with a liberal dose of liberal sentiment thrown into the mix.

 It’s been years since I discovered Ken Follett with the publication of his “Eye of the Needle” (1978 ) S ince then his talent as an original thriller writer  has given us "”The Key to Rebecca,” “Lie Down with Lions” and “On   Wings of Eagles.”

 Now we have from Follett “Whiteout” (Dutton;26.95), a 21st Century drama that again finds Follett at the top of his inventive form..

It is l a.m. Christmas Eve and most of the scientists at Oxenford Medical, Scotland’s premier pharmaceuticals company are enjoying a well-deserved holiday rest.  But for Toni Gallo, the company’s chief of security , the holiday is anything but relaxing.  Security at Oxenford is taken very seriously and when Toni discovers a canister of Madoba-2 virus missing  a frantic late-night investigation begins.  Her persistence leads her to Michael Ross, a shy well-mannered scientist with an unnatural affection for his mother and a burgeoning dedication to animal rights.

 By  the time Toni arrives at his houseRoss is found lying motionless on the floor, barely alive and caked in blood.  At this point, a Christmas Eve  blizzard whips out of the north, and the situation deteriorates further.  Public word of the  virus loss would be cataclysmic, and Toni is bothered by a local television reporter who  puts his “scoop” ahead of public safety. As Toni, over the next twenty-four hours, races to find the stolen canister and vials, desperate secrets are revealed, traitors are uncovered and unlikely heroes emerge.  Top Follett, at the top of his form again this time with bioterrorism  in his sights.

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 Back to Scotland, a wonderful book in a new series by Alexander McCall Smith with a new heroine as bracingly original  as McCall Smith’s  Precious Ramotswe in the No.1  Ladies Detective Agency series. The new lady in town is Isabel Dalhousie, a backbone of Edinburgh society, with bracing good manners, charm, and stimulating in several senses of the word, depending on whether she is conducting her Sunday philosophy club or whether she is presiding over her household with the advice of her housekeeper, Grace, who has been raised in the traditional values of Edinburgh, or her niece, Kat, who has given up her last lover for someone Isobel considers totally unsuitable.  Sometimes Isabel who conducts The Sunday Philosophy Club (Pantheon; $19.95) and  who edits a philosophy journal, gets caught up in questions that really  are none of her business, but that she insists upon investigating anyway.  Like when Isabel sees a young man plunge to his death from the upper circle of a concert hall in Edinburgh.  Isabel is determined to find the truth behind the young man’s death.  The resulting moral labyrinth might try even Kant.  The entire enterprise is as bracing as a Scotch mist.

 McCall Smith, who was born in Botswana, taught there for many years, now lives in Scotland where he is professor of medical law at Edinburgh University.In his spare time he is a bassoonist in the RTO (Really Terrible Orchestra.)

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Jeffery Cruikshank is a well-known financial writer and a former administrator at the Harvard Business School who has written such non-fiction books as “Do  lunch or Be lunch”.  When he came to write fiction, he naturally went back to his “B” school roots to bring us “Murder At The B-School.” (Mysterious Press,$24.95)

Wim Vermeer is a struggling assistant professor, worrying about his tenure track , which seems, right now, non-existent..  When the school’s star student is found drowned in a campus hot tub, the school administrators   assign Wim to placate both the boy’s wealthy parents and the Boston police, in the form of detective Barbara Brouillard.

Though the drowning at first seems like a freak accident Wim is shocked when it, looks as if murder is the more likely explanation.  And it seems as if Wim is to be set up as the chief suspect.

 Forced to discover the truth, Wim begins a quest that will take him through the mountain hamlets of upstate New York, the swank hotels of Boston and the lush beaches of the Carribbean and uses his professorial research skills to bring off  the search for truth.  Eminently readable, and plotted by a writer who brings a graceful touch to low crimes in haute Boston.

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